Herzog: Getting rid of Sinwar only way to get back hostages

President Isaac Herzog says capturing or killing Hamas’s Gaza leader Yahya Sinwar is the determining factor in releasing hostages held by the terror group in Gaza.

“At the end of the day, there’s no choice, we have to keep fighting, we need to bring Sinwar dead or alive so we can see the hostages brought home,” Herzog says at a ribbon-cutting ceremony for a Mobileye campus in Jerusalem.

The comments come as Israel appears to abandon indirect talks with Hamas aimed at freeing the hostages, after the terror group rejected a US compromise for a six-week truce.

“This is the reality, and the world should take note: It all starts and ends with Sinwar,” he says, according to comments from his office. “He’s the one who decided on the October 7 massacre, it’s he who has looked to spill the blood of innocents, he who works to enflame the whole region, to destroy Ramadan, does everything to ruin coexistence, here and across the region, to cause us to fight with each other and with the whole world. It’s he who seeks to deploy terror, and the whole world and the whole region should know that responsibility is his alone and he won’t get away with it. We won’t let him.”